Acknowledgements

This major undertaking has received the generous technical and
scientific support of many individuals. The NRAO staff has provided
extremely valuable assistance in many aspects of the observations
themselves and in the area of software support; in particular, we are
grateful to Rick Perley, Ken Sowinski, Barry Clark, and Bill Cotton in
this regard. The support of the erstwhile NRAO Director, Paul van den Bout, and
the yeoman service provided by Frazer Owen as Chair of the Survey
Oversight Committee are also greatly appreciated. We also thank the
members of the Oversight Committee (Ken Chambers, Eric Feigelson,
Jackie Hewitt, Gillian Knapp, and Rogier Windhorst) for their time and
wise counsel in this enterprise.

Acknowledgement is also due our colleagues who are involved in the
ongoing FIRST effort, including
Richard McMahon
and
Isobel Hook.
This
work is supported in part under the auspices of the Department of
Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No.
W-7405-ENG-48 and the Institute for
Geophysics and Planetary Physics,
whose former director Charles Alcock was particularly supportive. We also
acknowledge a generous planning grant from the CalSpace Institute;
support from the STScI
archive group, former STScI director Bob Williams, and the STScI Director's
Discretionary Research Fund; computing resources from Columbia
University; grants from the
National Science Foundation;
a gift of computing equipment from
Sun Microsystems;
a
NATO
travel grant to support our collaboration with Richard McMahon;
and an award from the
National Geographic Society
which, in the spirit
of their support 40 years ago for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey,
has provided funds to continue our charting of the Universe.